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<\/a>He says it is the cheapest electric guitar money can buy.<\/p>\nWhether or not I was ever able to play the guitar can be disputed. I would assess myself as “slightly above Three Chord Trickster level”. I certainly cannot play the guitar any more since I became disabled, though.<\/p>\n
Let me re-phrase the last statement. How about: Since I became disabled, I cannot play the guitar in a way an audience would expect a professional guitarist to perform.<\/em><\/p>\n Regardless of any disabilities, everybody also has at least some<\/em> abilities, even though it can be a challenge to discover them and then “just go and do it”.\u00a0 I have been calling this attitude Just Play<\/em>, in response to the Sound Art motto Just Listen<\/em>.<\/p>\n Last December (2011) after her concert in Dublin, I spoke with Evelyn Glennie<\/a> about improvising and “just playing”, especially in the context of the need to work around disabilities. I am passing on her ideas and views over the coming weeks and months\u2026 together with some of my own, as I continue exploring this guitar.<\/p>\n By saying just play<\/em> I meant to encourage people to let go of inhibitions and to just do it. Dame Evelyn points out that to use the word play<\/em> sometimes may be quite frightening for people who have not played an instrument before. In order to motivate and encourage people, she prefers to simply ask people to create a sound<\/em>. Making sounds, in her experience, is more approachable for most people than being asked to play something.<\/p>\n On this “just create sounds” basis, she asks people to introduce themselves though the instrument. This helps her to easily find out more about the personality of students she works with: degrees of extroversion, shyness, and so forth\u2026 and suddenly they realize they are actually playing<\/em> the instrument, but they haven’t been concentrating on it because they were concentrating on introducing<\/em> themselves.<\/p>\n I got the clear impression that to Dame Evelyn making music is primarily about creating sounds by any accessible means. I mentioned Sound Art, and how I see it, in many cases, as a marketing label for music which doesn’t really fit into any commercial genre or category. She spoke about looking at Foley Artists as musicians – a Foley Artist’s instrument might be a sofa, and a range of different sounds might be required for a sound track\u2026 and she treated me to a little private impromptu Foley performance on the sofa in the backstage reception area at the NCH.<\/p>\n I shall pass on more insights and words of encouragement by Dame Evelyn as I write more about my exploration of this electric guitar and about improvising. For my first piece, I am trying to introduce myself. It doesn’t quite work like the scenario Evelyn Glennie spoke about: I have been making music all my life. I don’t need to overcome inhibitions, and I have already moved beyond the “I cannot play any more” block. Instead, I am finding new ways to play instruments which I am not able to play the common practice way. Listening back to it now, it seems to me that I very much introduced my current style of composing and improvising through creating sounds with this guitar: The piece I came up with clearly fits in with what I have been experimenting with during the last few months – the main difference is the source of the sounds I have used: a real musical instrument, rather than recordings of me beating doors, gates and bins around the City.<\/p>\n I improvised four overdubbed tracks, bowing and plucking the guitar, and inserting objets between the strings to make twangs and rattles. I edited the resulting 6 minutes down to under 4 minutes\u2026 perhaps this makes the music more radio friendly?<\/p>\n My friend Metalizer, a really good guitarist with whom I have been jamming for decades, didn’t cringe when I played this for him. Amazing….<\/p>\n By the way: I used no effects, apart from some reverberation. It is all just plain electric guitar.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Denis gave me an indefinite loan of his old electric guitar to experiment with. He says it is the cheapest electric guitar money can buy. Whether or not I was ever able to play the guitar can be disputed. I … Continue reading <\/a>The Way I Like To Do Things<\/a>, 4 MB in the iTunes format, 3:50 of music – feel free to deconstruct or remix it – the terms and conditions are in the disclaimer page<\/a>.<\/p>\n